Great Art is Not Timeless

Great art is not timeless, says HDF Kitto in Greek Tragedy (pg 101), unless we take the trouble to understand its idiom.

Kitto's study of Athenian tragic drama was written in 1939 (and updated into the 1960s), and had the luxury of not being troubled by post-modernism, intersectionality or contemporary semiotics. While he has the virtue of sticking close to the texts, he doesn't always build his arguments on attributions or footnotes, making his philosophy of theatre more personal and, incidentally, readable. 

When he does mention other academics, it is usually to debunk their theories or, when it comes to Aristotle and The Poetics, to weaken their dogmatic grip on analysis. 

When he addresses the problems of presenting Aeschylus or Sophocles to a 'contemporary' audience (and this is not the same contemporary audience in 2016), he stresses that any script was written within a specific historical moment, and the author would make assumptions about what issues and ideas were shared and important.

Kitto exposes the tension within the idea of a canon - a selection of artworks that are 'for the ages'. Outside of their idiom, or context, any artwork flounders and miscommunicates.

He expounds with some confidence on Shakespeare's culture (a shared appreciation of medieval understandings of monarchy and religion), and is able to elaborate on the classical culture that frames Euripides and the gang. 

The Night Before I Depart (Giants in the Forest, chapter 1.1)

The night before I depart, I spend a few hours looking over maps and my schedule. The first week is going to be spent in a part of Scotland that is unfamiliar – the phrase I’ll hear, and begin to use, is ‘underrated.’ The Borders conjures up ideas of conflict – I am sure that 7.84 did a play about it in the 1990s at Tramway. Since my main guide to the Scottish landscape, a battered copy of Julian Cope’s Modern Antiquarian, seems not to have a section dedicated to Peebles and Galashiels, I am stepping into the unknown.

My intention for this week is to travel light. Unfortunately, I am breaking my travels at Falkland for a weekend of camping. My rucksack will contain my tent but, realising that I have plotted a couple of long walks (long by my lazy fitness levels), I dump the sleeping bag for a cotton slip. I take a single book – Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy. I’ve been meaning to read it for years, it’s slim enough and doesn’t have all those distracting proclamations about God’s mortality that I don’t understand. In retrospect, a water bottle would have been a good idea.

The Giants in the Forest are an intriguing project: they have been placed around Scotland in collaboration with local groups, designed by Vision Mechanics – a company I know as one of the imaginative contemporary puppet masters that Scotland is breeding. I have an outline of their purpose – once in place, they become both a focus for local activity and a nice surprise for unsuspecting walkers. My own purpose, a blogger travelling between the sites, is less clear. I am part of the documentation, at least. I’m winding myself up to bring something more dramatic to my responses.

I’m more used to cities, and theatres, and art galleries.  I relate the locations to pop up versions of an art space – although most of the Giants were put in place last year and have already seen a summer and winter, I am focused on them as sculptures. Going out into the countryside, I am worrying about long walks and how well my choice of suit will hold up in what appears to be the height of summer. Having decided that I would risk hitching for certain sections of the journey, I’ve gone with a natty pin stripe. It does clash with the red rucksack.

I check the schedule. I am looking at the first three days out, ignoring later excursions – my brain gets confused at the complexity of different transports over the month. It’s Bowhill first, and a long journey. It starts on the train, then goes to a series of buses. Finally, I am going to walk from Selkirk to the Estate. I am hoping that the final stage, down to the Giants, isn’t going to be a problem for my smart shoes.

I have a look at the introduction of The Birth. This copy has some useless notes, and seems to clarify the entire idea in two pages. Its vision of nature – wild, untamed and probably hostile – doesn’t cheer me up.

Medea: A Game of Two Halves, Brian.

For all the infanticide, marital strife and general gender warfare, the real tension in this Medea is whether updating the story from ancient Corinth to a contemporary housing estate can make the myth modern. Euripides' original is pretty unambiguous about Medea's power: she has real, nasty magical powers. Suburban housewives in the twenty-first century tend not to be able to conjure chariots led by dragons, and Medea's ultimate triumph does rather depend on her ability to pull off the murders and escape.

Mike Bartlett's version is faithful to the structure of the original: the central agon with Jason is preserved, as is the process of Medea from despairing, jilted wife to cunning avenger. The script is most comfortable when Medea is in full-flow: Rachael Stirling brings the right mixture of malicious rage and self-deprecating charm to Bartlett's words, building sympathy for her plight, respect for her intelligence and belief in the justice of her cause. Adam Levy, as Jason, sadly gets the worst of it: like Euripides' Jason, he is a bland, respectable and self-serving fool, easily seduced by Medea (and his future wife, Kate) and constantly wrong-footed by Medea's sharp intellect.

Despite an uninspiring opening scene - two women bitching about the closeness of their friendship to Medea, which diverts attention from the central battle between male and female into a side-bar on female rivalry - Medea successfully develops the tension: scenes between Medea and her silent son are fraught, Jason and his landlord Carter (the replacement for the original's King of Corinth) are appropriately boorish, and if Medea's seduction of Andrew (formerly King Aegeus, who offers her sanctuary, now a holiday home in Spain) is clumsy, the slow build to the climatic murders is both engaging and sinister.

Sadly, the finale destroys the good work. Opting not to find a modern alternative to the magic, Bartlett offers Medea's attack on Jason's new wife as mysterious - suddenly, after working so hard to translate Medea into a modern woman, he reverts to her as a mysterious witch. The messenger's speech - Bartlett uses the conventions well, and Amelia Lowdell rises to the monologue - is far too close to the original in both detail and spirit. At this point, all the modern trappings are cast aside.

The last speech is even worse: Medea is up on the roof, covered in blood, shouting about how her father liked hacking animals to death and her son's success in an egg and spoon race. She sets her house on fire - this is closer to the wonderful film version by Pasolini - and the police turn up. She's neither vindicated - hard readings of Euripides suggest that she is justified - nor condemned - killing children isn't a good thing. She just announces her fantasy of escape in a speech that will define theatrical bathos for the next year.



There's a real pleasure in watching the plot unfold, despite this absurd ending: Stirling nails the modern Medea, and the supporting cast are solid. There are many moments in the script of sly, dark humour and the various shifts in Medea's mood are carried off skilfully. It might simply be that there is nothing new to say about this skirmish in the war between husband and wife - certainly, children are used as weapons, but the moral is pretty unambiguous.

Until 17 October, Citizens